Sometime Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, DiskWarrior finally completed “Step 5: Locating directory data…” which gives an elapsed time of 200-216 hours or almost 9 days! It’s currently working on “Step 6: Overlapped files detected: 146″ which translates to quite a bit of manual effort for me. 
Step 6 has been running for somewhere between 26-41 hours as of this post.
Lessons learned:
- Backups!
- Don’t trust Apple’s disk diagnostics. Run the S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics from the DW CD before attempting recovery with DW!
- If the diagnostics indicate disk failure, don’t use DW. Try DataRescue instead. There’s no point running DW on failing hardware.
- Backups!
I’ll update this post as steps are finished.
Update 2005-10-06 23:58:27 UTC: It’s been on step 6 all day, now up to 186 overlapped files detected, sigh. I’m about to leave for the night. Hopefully tomorrow will be the day I get my data back…
Update 2005-10-10 15:48:55 UTC: It spent all weekend on step 6, now up to 675 overlapped files after more than 5 days. Ugh!
Update 2005-10-11 15:40:36 UTC: Step 6 has been running 6 days. Overlaped files detected: 807. And counting…
Update 2005-10-12 14:34:20 UTC: 7 days, 935 overlapped files. I am so screwed…
Update 2005-10-14 00:37:53 UTC: It’s now been almost 9 days since step 5 completed.
Step 6: Overlapped files detected: 1124
Update 2005-10-17 15:26:00 UTC: 12 days on step 6 now, 1605 overlapped files. I’ve got a lot of time invested in this, but I’m starting to wonder if it’ll be worth it. (Of course, my co-workers have been telling me to bail on this process for quite a while now. Considering that I’ve been running DW for three weeks, they have some reason.)
Update 2005-10-24 17:23:46 UTC: Step 6 is on its 19th day, 2512 overlapped files. I’ve been running DiskWarrior for 4 weeks straight. I’m really missing my laptop (whimper). I’ll be crossing the 1-month boundary this week, and if it’s not done by then I’m giving up.
Update 2005-11-09 18:09:25 UTC: After more than five weeks (and 4586 overlapped files) on “Step 6,” I’m giving up.
Good god, that’s a long process. Here I am cursing and fuming about my loss of data, and I’ve only been waiting on DW for a couple of hours. Yes, step 5 is the problem. I’ve even stuck a bit of blue-tac on my monitor over the progress bar end so I can see if even 1 pixel of progress has been made (it hasn’t since seemingly stalling).
Keep on updating, I want to know if your patience pays off.
lol! I did exactly the same thing at one point! (The tape on the monitor.)
Yeah, this time around it really sucks! The first time I ran DW was bad enough. I wish I had hooked up an external disk right from the start, but as I mentioned earlier I though my hardware was okay.
Last night when I went home, it was still on step 6, and I was in too much of a hurry to leave work to update the post. I’ll probably stop by work today and see how it’s going (and add an update).
Guess what, same problem here. Diskwarrior’s been running close to 2 weeks now and it shows up as “not responding” on the dock eventhough the activity monitor indicates it’s still working. Last I checked, it was at 5000+ overlapped files until the window stopped responding a little while ago. But it’s kinda normal for apps to “hang” for long-term activities. I get the same response burning DVDs and digitizing video.
Oh man… “5000+ overlapped files” is not something I want to hear! (I need a “smiley” of a guy open-mouthed, pop-eyed, with hair standing on end.)
Dude, I hope you come out okay. Did you run hardware diagnostics before you started? (Wish I had…)
i found this entry while looking for similar diskwarrior cases on google. it seems like step 6 can take as much as 48 hours, but your 6 weeks (!) is definitely the record. i am running diskwarrior on one of my external drives right now, it started to fail the mounting process after i tried to fix it with apple’s disk utility, the crappiest disk tool ever. the drive was working just fine, and i decided to verify/repair it for good measure, and boom, disk utility killed it.
so disk warrior has been running for 24 hours now, and found 1947 overlapping files so far. i can only hope that it won’t go on forever.
after around 50 hours, diskwarrior gave me my drive back, with all the files intact. it ended up with 1961 overlapped files. i guess i was lucky, but from now on i will make sure i have a copy the diskwarrior cd with me wherever i go. i love this program!
I’ve been stuck in Step 5 for nine days now, but optimisticly waiting. I’ve been told that two days is normal, so I thought that if this case is more severe it’ll take perhaps a week…
But - even DW should move on to Step 6 - several weeks would be too much.
Thanks to everybody for your comments, it’s good to know what’s going on - yet being bad news…
Gave up, but tried again. Though stayed in step 5 for some days now, this time DW has not yet informed about disk malfunction - how is it possible? Could it be sort of “repaired” accidentally - or could the malfunction have been “misjudged”? The candy bar turns about once a minute.
WOW! I don’t have even remotely as much patience to let it run for like 50 hours. The data is definitely not as important to me to warrant a few weeks of no access to my only computer.
DW has been running at step 6 now for about 3 hours, and I can only hope it will finish. I’m at 181 overlapped files now. There’s another one. Make that 182. I suspect I was running too many apps for too long without restarting. After uploading some pictures the machine started to slow down but hung before I could shut down.
Ran DW for a couple of days (step 6) too long. The drive will not mount in OS X but will mount with OS 9.3.9. So, I think I will have to purchase anoyher drive and transfer the data, then format the bad drive.
Decided to try the new version of DW (4). It blew right by the overlapped file section and fixed the drive…about 1/2 hour!!!! Cost me $100, but worth it.
Because I have run Diskwarrior probably thousands of times (tech job), I can say with the utmost confidence that you should bail out on Diskwarrior when it finds more than 2 overlapped files. It will attempt to fix, and then fail.
Get a report on the overlapped files if there are only a few, and then delete ones if possible (like if they are only cache documents), and then run Diskwarrior again.
Diskwarrior is a great application, but it does not do well with overlapped files. Drive Genius does though.
I breezed right by that step, but now it is stuck on step 8.
Hey Alan, if you have the DiskWarrior CD, try running the diagnostics first. (Boot from the CD, which should give you a menu if I remember correctly.) If your disk is failing, don’t use DW. Install a new disk, and perhaps DataRescue may help you recover information from the failing/failed disk.
How could it fail though? It was working just fine a couple minutes ago. How could software physically destroy the drive, (not by any means underestimating what people could do i suppose, but an osx disk?)
Thanks, I’ll try the diagnostics test and see what comes up.
Sorry for the delay. I missed the notification of your comment. DiskWarrior can exacerbate a drive failure by “exercising” it (read: “beating the crap out of it”). DW really tries hard to recover all the data off a disk. If it has to read a sector over and over and over, it will.
Jim,
I have been running my DW for 4 days now. and it has been hanging on step 5 forever. The number is incrementing, just super slow. I read your blog. I think I should give it up, should I? Just reinstall the OS and to get it over with. Fortunately, I don’t have lots of data in my laptop because it was just crashed a few weeks ago. and i had to reinstall the OS. Your advice is greatly appreciated.
thanks
I had to call a quit on DW. Right now, once I turn it on, the DW screen does not show up any more. The laptop is on for a little while and automatically shut down by itself. The DW disk is still inside my laptop. How can I get it out? so that I can insert the Snow and get it over with. thanks for help guys!!! My computer is the black Macbook.
Jim you are so right. My disk now is completely failed after running DW for 4 days. I did run the diagnosis first before I was trying to rebuild the directory and diagnosis result was normal.
@Jade: Sorry to hear about your laptop! For boot options (e.g. how to eject your CD), please see my boot options post. <-That’s a link, just mouse over “boot options post”. These are for a PowerBook G4, but they may still work for your laptop.
I highly recommend DataRescue if you need to recover anything off of your existing disk.
Hi, Jim.
It’s been 4 days that DW is stuck on Step 5, with 1,103 disk malfunction errors. And it’s just so slow. Reading Jade’s previous comment, now i’m just hoping it’s not too late trying DataRescue. Thanks for telling about your experience. Keeping you guys up with my case.
Config: Powerbook G4, running on Firewire hard drive, 60gb. Trying to recover data from the PB’s original 80gb disk.
Hi back!
Tried DataRescue all over yesterday, as well as all night long. Seemed to work very fine, detected the drive and so on. But, while it actually found 41,600 nodes by quick scanning, it has been stuck on the 17,336th pretty quickly, maybe 5 minutes after being run. This morning, ie after 1day 1night of calculus, it was only at the 17,776th node. Considering that four hundred nodes had been scanned in about a day and a night, and considering over 22,000 were left, this was leading us to 55 days of hard work to come: almost 8 weeks. I actually chose to give it up for the moment, and to try out other softwares later. Indeed, i just managed to bring back my PB to life by plugging an external Firewire drive to it, i want to take a bit the most of it. He died 3 months ago, i didn’t want to bother myself with 2 months more without any laptop.
Anyway, i’ll be posting news about my case over here, if there’s anything changed positively. Thanks again Jim, and keep up the good work!
I’ve been running DW 4 for three days now. It is on setp 5 and shows “Speed reduced by disk malfunction: 4990″ It is slowly climbing…..sllloooooowwly. Do I keep going? I really really need some photos off of this drive. Other than that I would just format it.
@So Frustrated: I recommend that you stop it now! Get an external/additional disk and try Data Rescue. It sounds like your original disk is so far gone that Disk Warrior is doing more harm than good.
Too late……ug. Stopped it and DW doesn’t see the drive now. Tried the OS install and no drive showing.
I’m going on 24 hours on step six. So sick, cause everything work related is not working. Downloaded Diskwarrior and at first it worked great but something happened and I can’t even see my drive any more. Tried DW again and now I’m stuck on Step 6 for about 20 hours at this point… Has anybody actually recovered data after a long recovery process like this??
I want to cry…….